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Political Opinions on Social Media and Adulthood

We all have those friends who actively tweet, post, text- whatever it may be- about the issues of the day. These are not our friends who occasionally post about something that is breaking through the clutter on every media outlet. These are the friends who will post about a congressman voting a certain way on one bill out of the hundreds they vote on. These friends will declare that the politician deserves to lose everyone’s support despite all of their other votes that align with the ranter’s interests. We all have these friends. They are all equally as obnoxious, but we keep them around for one reason or another.

The one thing I will say about these friends (whether they are real or social), is that they are shockingly consistent. You can depend on these people to clog up your feed almost all of the time. Up until now, I have had a very simple reaction to these posts: to ignore them. Not because I find these people annoying necessarily, but because I can almost always count on having absolutely NO idea what these people are ranting about. It’s like reading someone writing in Chinese- I have no need.

Living under a rock has been a strong suit of mine up until very recently. Politics overwhelmed me because no one could come up with a middle of the road realistic solution to anything. The problems are so big, and the sides so extreme, that I decided to stay out of it as opposed to get incredibly stressed out about the state of disarray our world is in. This being said, I was not pulled out from under happy un-political bubble I was living in by choice. It was by necessity because after college I realized I needed to get a job- as many do. I was lucky enough to land one that I was dying to get- however the side effect of this job is that I needed to know everything there was to know about politics. The NBA, NHL, and the MLB are 50% of my day (how lucky am I)… and then the world of politics is the other 50.

Enter my current situation. When I say I need to know everything about politics, I’m not talking about big picture politics here. I’m talking politics down to who is battling it out for every political office in all 50 states. I need to know how much funding every single campaign has, and how much of that funding goes toward media. I even have to know what every obscurely named SuperPAC actually stands for, and how much backing they get. I do not dislike politics- I never have. I have disliked the nature of understanding politics. You cannot understand them unless you dive straight in and know absolutely everything about everything. If you miss an episode of a show, you can read a short synopsis and get right back into it. If you miss a political scandal, it’s like you’re living without a limb. Therefore I have had to educate myself on approximately 22 years of political happenings.

For someone who admittedly could not tell you the two senators of her state before this job, there was a GIANT mentality switch that needed to happen. As is typical of these situations, the mentality switch only happened due to the direness of the situation. I can confidently say that I do not think I would have had even a quarter of the political knowledge that I do now had it not been for this job. This article formulated in my head the moment I realized that I knew more about the FEC spending reports that were just filed for 3rd quarter (do any of you even know what this is?) than Lamar Odom’s hospitalization. Talk about a wake up call.

This is one of the few drastic changes that I have been undergoing as a post graduate. More to come on this subject. Until then, my head will be buried in the news.